by Steve Toltz
Love is the Ultimate Informer because of the conviction it inspires that your love is eternal and immutable- you can no more imagine the end of your love than you can imagine the end of your own head. And because love is nothing without intimacy, and intimacy is nothing without sharing, and sharing is nothing without honesty, you must inevitably spill the beans, every last bean, because dishonesty in intimacy is unworkable and will slowly poison your precious love.
When it ends- and it will end (even the most risk-embracing gambler wouldn’t touch those odds)- he or she, the love object, has your secrets. And can use them. And if the relationship ends acrimoniously, he or she will use them, viciously and maliciously- will use them against you.
Furthermore, it is highly probable that the secrets you reveal when your soul has all its clothes off will be the cause of the end of love. Your intimate revelations will be the flame that lights the fuse that ignites the dynamite that blows your love to kingdom come.
No, you say. She understands my violent ways. She understands that the end justifies the means.
Think about this. Being in love is a process of idealization. Now ask yourself, how long can a woman be expected to idealize a man who held his foot on the head of a drowning man? Not too long, believe me. And cold nights in front of the fire, when you get up and slice off another piece of cheese, you don’t think she’s dwelling on that moment of unflinching honesty when you revealed sawing off the feet of your enemy? Well, she is.
If a man could be counted on to dispose of his partner the moment the relationship is over, this chapter wouldn’t be necessary. But he can’t be counted on for that. Hope of reconciliation keeps many an ex alive who should be at the bottom of a deep gorge.
So, lawbreakers, whoever you are, you need to keep your secrets for your survival, to keep your enemies at bay and your body out of the justice system. Sadly- and this is the lonely responsibility we all have to accept- the only way to do this is to stay single. If you need sexual relief, go to a hooker. If you need an intimate embrace, go to your mother. If you need a bed warmer during cold winter months, get a dog that is not a Chihuahua or a Pekingese. But know this: to give up your secrets is to give up your security, your freedom, your life. The truth will kill your love, then it will kill you. It’s rotten, I know. But so is the sound of the judge’s gavel pounding a mahogany desk.
I closed the book and lay in bed thinking about honesty and lies and decided that my feelings were honest but I was toes to eyeballs with secret stories and secret thoughts, none of which I had revealed to the Towering Inferno. Why had I been instinctively following the book’s advice, a book written for criminals? Well, how could I reveal all the unimpressive things I’d done, like the time I was cornered by bullies and pretended to sleep through the beating they gave me? Or the time, just a week into our relationship, I was so jealous at the thought of the Towering Inferno sneaking off and sleeping with someone else that I went off and slept with someone else just so I wouldn’t have any right to be jealous? No, I wasn’t even going to tell her the good stuff, like how some mornings I came out of the labyrinth to the main road to find the streetlights still humming above me, an early wind tickling the trees, and the familiar scent of jasmine leading to a friendly confusion of the senses so it was as if my nose were full of the soft, heady smell of a light pink eyelid. I felt so fantastic bouncing in the warm morning air, I picked up a garden gnome from someone’s lawn and put it on the lawn across the street. Then I undid a garden hose from that family’s lawn and placed it on their neighbor’s front porch. I thought: We’re sharing today, people! What’s his is yours! What’s yours is his! Only later it did seem like a strange thing to have done, so I kept the story from penetrating my lover’s inner eardrum.
And because it was apparent to me just how thoroughly I was infected by Dad’s mistrust of everything, including his own thoughts, feelings, opinions, and intuitions- leading me to mistrust my own thoughts, feelings, opinions, and intuitions- neither could I tell her that every now and then I enter some dreamy trance state in which it’s as if all the opposing forces of the universe submit to a sudden and inexplicable ceasefire and melt together until I feel like I have a piece of creation stuck between my teeth. Maybe I’m out walking in the street or simply erasing porn site addresses from my Internet browser’s history, when suddenly it’s as if I am wrapped in a soft golden mist. What is it, exactly? A period of superconsciousness, where the I of Me becomes the Us of We, where We is either Me and a Cloud or Me and a Tree and sometimes Me and a Sunset or Me and the Horizon but rarely Me and Butter or Me and Chipped Enamel. How could I explain it to her? To attempt to communicate uncommunicable ideas is to risk oversimplifying them, and the organic thrill is just going to come off sounding like an organic cheap thrill, and what would she think of these enchanting incomprehensible hallucinations anyway? She might rush to the conclusion that I am actually at one with the universe while others are not. It’s like Dad said: moments of cosmic consciousness could simply be a natural reaction to a sudden unconscious awareness of our own mortality. For all we know, the feeling of unity might be the greatest proof of separateness there is. Who knows? Just because they feel like genuine apprehensions of Truth doesn’t mean they are. I mean, if you mistrust one sense, you must mistrust them all. There’s no reason the sixth sense might not be as misleading as smell or sight. That’s the lesson I’ve learned from my father, the headline news from the corner that he thought himself into: direct intuitions are as untrustworthy as they are potent.
So you see? How could I tell her about these things when I wasn’t sure whether I’d just put one over on myself? Neither could I tell her that sometimes I was certain I could read my father’s thoughts and other times I suspected he could read mine. Sometimes, I tried to tell him something just by thinking it, and I’d feel I could hear him respond in the negative; I sensed a “Fuck you” traveling through the ether. Nor could I tell the Inferno that more than once I’d had visions of a disembodied face. I first dreamed of the face in my childhood, a tanned, mustached, thick-lipped, wide-nosed face floating out of a dark void, his piercing eyes giving off an aura of sexual violence, his mouth contorted into a silent scream. I’m sure this has happened to everyone. Then one day you see the face even when you’re awake. You see it in the sun. You see it in the clouds. You see it in the mirror. You see it clearly, even though it’s not there. Then you feel it too. And you stand up and say, “Who’s there?” And when you receive no answer, you say, “I’m calling the police.” And what is this presence anyway if in fact it’s not a ghost? The most likely explanation: a fully exteriorized and manifested idea. There were things crawling inside my brain itching to get out, and, worse, they were getting out and I had no control over where and when.
No, why air every ugly, negative, loopy, idiotic thought that floats through the head? That’s why when you’re standing by the harbor and your lover says, in a tender embrace, “What are you thinking about?” you don’t respond, “That I hate people and I wish they’d fall down and never get up.” I’m telling you. You just can’t say it. I don’t know much about women, but I do know that.
***
I fell asleep, and at four in the morning I woke with a shocking realization: I’d never told the Towering Inferno that Terry Dean was my uncle.
I stared at the clock until eight a.m. without looking away once, then called Brian.
“Who is it?”
“How did you know I was Terry Dean’s nephew?”
“Jasper?”
“How did you know?”
“Your girlfriend told me.”
“Yeah, I know, I was just checking. So, um…you and her, then…”
“What about us?”
“She said you went out with her for just a little while.”
He didn’t say anything. In the silence I heard him breathing like someone who knows he has the upper hand, and I wound up breathing like someone stuck with the lower hand, and then he began telling me
not just about him and her but things about her she had kept secret- her whole life, it seemed: how she ran away from home at fifteen and stayed two months with a drug dealer in Chippendale named Freddy Luxembourg and how she went back home one abortion later and changed schools and how when she was sixteen she started going out by herself to bars and that’s where they met and she ran away from home again and lived with him for one year until she caught him with another woman and totally freaked out and ran back home again and her parents sent her to a psychologist who declared her a human time bomb and how she’d been calling him and leaving strange messages on his answering machine about her new boyfriend who was going to kill him if he ever showed his face in her life again. It surprised me to learn that the killer boyfriend was me.
I took all this with pretend calm, saying things like “Uh-huh” and trying not to show alarm at the unsettling conclusions I was drawing. That she had been calling her old boyfriend and leaving surly messages on his phone meant that she was probably still hung up on him, and that he in return was talking to her about getting his old job back meant that he was probably still hung up on her.
I couldn’t get my head around it. She’d lied to me! She had lied to me! Me! I was supposed to be the liar in this relationship!
I hung up and threw my legs over the side of the bed like two anchors. I didn’t get up. I sat on that bed for hours, breaking the spell only to call in sick to work. At around five I finally got out of bed and sat on the back veranda emptying tobacco out of my cigarette and into a pipe. I stared at the sunset because I thought I saw a face in it, a face in the sun, that old familiar face I hadn’t seen in a long time. All around me cicadas were making a racket. It sounded like they were closing in. I thought about catching one and fixing it into the pipe and smoking it. I was wondering if it would get me high when I saw a red flare shoot into the sky. I put down the pipe and set off in the direction of the trail of vapor that hung in the air. It was her. I had given her a flare gun because she often got lost in the maze.
I found her near a large boulder and took her back to the hut. When we got inside, I told her everything Brian had told me. She looked at me, her eyes death-empty.
“Why didn’t you tell me you lived with him for a year?” I yelled.
“Well, you haven’t been honest with me either. You didn’t tell me that your uncle is Terry Dean!”
“Why would I? I never met him! It was a long time ago. I was minus two years old when he died. What I want to know is, why didn’t you tell me that you knew about my uncle?”
“Look. Let’s be honest with each other from now on,” she said.
“Yes, let’s.”
“Scrupulously honest.”
“We’ll tell each other everything.”
The door was wide open. Neither of us stepped through it. It was the time to ask questions and answer them, like two informants who’d just discovered that each had made separate immunity deals with the public prosecutor.
“I’m going to have a shower,” she said.
I watched her walk across the room, and when she bent over to pick up a towel from the floor, I noticed how the back of her jeans curved away from her body, like an evil grin.
VI
After this incident I got into the bad habit of treating her with courtesy and respect. Courtesy and respect are advisable when addressing a judge right before he sentences you, but in a relationship they signify discomfort. And I was uncomfortable because she still hadn’t gotten over Brian. This was not baseless paranoia, either. She had started comparing me to him, unfavorably. For instance, she said I wasn’t as romantic as Brian, just because I’d once said in an intimate moment, “I love you with all of my brain.” Is it my fault she didn’t understand how the heart has stolen credit from the head, that wild passionate feelings actually come from the ancient limbic system in the brain, and that I was just trying to avoid referring to the heart as the actual storehouse of all my feelings when it is, after all, only a soggy, bloody pump and filter system? Is it my fault people can’t enjoy a symbol without turning it into a literal fact? Which is why, by the way, you should never waste your time giving the human race an allegorical tale- in less than one generation they’ll turn it into historical data, complete with eyewitnesses.
Oh, and then there was the jar.
I was at her place, in her bedroom. We’d just had sex very quietly because her mother was in the next room. I enjoyed doing it quietly because when you can make all the noise you like you sort of go faster. Silent sex makes you slow down.
Afterward, when I was fishing on the floor for all the coins that had fallen from my jeans pockets, I saw the jar underneath her bed, mustard-sized, with a misty liquid floating in it, like cloudy water from a Mexican tap. Removing the lid, I sniffed tentatively, irrationally expecting the odor of sour milk. It smelled of nothing at all. I turned and watched her thin body settle on the bed. “Don’t spill it,” she said, before giving me another in a long dynasty of perfect smiles.
I dipped my finger in the jar, whipped it out, and licked it.
Salty.
I thought I knew what that meant. But could it really mean what I thought it meant? Was I actually, in reality, holding a jar of tears? Her tears?
“Tears, huh?” I said, as though everybody I knew collected their own tears, as if the whole world did nothing but forge monuments to their own sadness. I could imagine her pressing the little jar against her cheek, when the inaugural tear looked like the first raindrop sliding down a windowpane.
“What’s it for?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“I just collect my tears, that’s all.”
“Come on. There’s something more.”
“There’s not. Don’t you believe me?”
“Absolutely not.”
She stared at me a moment. “OK- I’ll tell you, but I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”
“OK.”
“Promise you won’t take it the wrong way?”
“That’s a hard promise to make. How will I know if I’m taking it the wrong way?”
“I’ll tell you.”
“OK.”
“OK. I’m collecting my tears because…I’m going to make Brian drink them,” she said.
I gritted my teeth and looked out the window. Outside, the drooping autumn trees looked like golden brown shrugs. “You’re still in love with him!” I shouted.
“Jasper!” she screamed. “You’re taking it the wrong way!”
About two weeks later she heaped another insult on top of the last one. We were in my hut, making love, making a hell of a racket this time, and as if going out of her way to confirm my worst suspicions, right in the middle of it she called out his name. “Brian!” she moaned breathlessly.
“Where?” I asked, startled, and started looking around the room for him.
“What are you doing?”
I stopped when I realized my stupid error. She gave me a look that deftly combined tenderness with revulsion. To this day the memory of that look still visits me like a Jehovah’s Witness, uninvited and tireless.
She climbed naked out of bed and made herself a cup of tea, grimacing with guilt.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice shaking.
“I don’t think you should close your eyes during sex anymore.”
“Hmm.”
“I want you to look at me the whole time. OK?”
“You don’t have any milk,” she said, squatting in front of the bar fridge.
“Yes, I do.”
“It’s lumpy.”
“But it’s still milk.”
She hadn’t finished sighing when I went out of the hut and walked in the darkness to Dad’s house. We were always breaking into each other’s houses to steal milk. It has to be said: I was the better thief. He would always come in while I was sleeping, but because he was paranoid about sell-by dates, I would awake to the sound of thunderous sn
iffing.
The night was the kind of thick, all-encompassing black that renders concepts such as north, south, east, and west unusable. After I’d stumbled over tree stumps and been slapped in the face by thorny branches, the lights of Dad’s house welcomed me and depressed me at the same time; they meant he was awake and I’d get stuck talking, that is, listening to him. I groaned. I was aware of our growing estrangement. It had started after I quit school and gradually worsened. I’m not sure why, but he’d unexpectedly resorted to normal parenting, especially in the use of emotional blackmail. He even once said the phrase “After all I’ve done for you.” Then he listed all that he’d done for me. It sounded like a lot, but many were small sacrifices such as “bought butter even though I like margarine.”
The truth was, I could no longer stand him: his unrelenting negativity, his negligence of both our lives, his inhuman reverence for books over people, his fanatical love for hating society, his inauthentic love for me, his unhealthy obsession with making my life as unpleasant as his. It occurred to me that he hadn’t made my life distressing as an afterthought, either, but had gone about dismantling me laboriously, as if he were being paid overtime to do it. He had a concrete pylon for a head, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. It seems to me you should be able to look at the people in your life and say “I owe you my survival” and “You owe me your survival,” and if you can’t say that, then what the hell are you doing with them? As it stood, I could only look at my father and think, “Well, I survived in spite of your meddling, you son of a bitch.”
The light was on in his living room. I peered through the window. Dad was reading the newspaper and crying.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, opening the sliding doors.
“What are you doing in here?”
“Stealing milk.”
“Well, steal your own milk!” he said.
I walked in and tore the newspaper out of his hands. It was one of the daily tabloids. Dad got up and went into the next room. I looked closer at the newspaper. The story Dad had been reading was about Frankie Hollow, the recently murdered rock star who, coming home from a tour, had been confronted by a crazed fan who shot him twice in the chest, once in the head, and once “for good luck.” Every single day since then the story had managed to make the front page, despite there being no additional facts after day one. Some days the papers included interviews with people who didn’t know anything and who in the course of the interview revealed nothing. Then they squeezed every last drop of blood out of the story by digging up the dead star’s past, and when there was absolutely, positively nothing left to report, they reported some more. I thought: Who prints this toe jam? And then I thought: Why is Dad crying over this celebrity death? I stood there with a thousand belittling phrases swimming in my head, trying to decide if I should lay the boot in. I decided against it; death is death, and mourning is mourning, and even if people choose to shed tears over the loss of a popular stranger, you can’t mock a sad heart.